James Battle, 49, was an able-bodied seaman who survived the Lusitania sinking. He was an Irish national and member of the Lusitania‘s deck crew, living at 59 Richmond Row, in the center of Liverpool. This biography is made possible by a collaboration with Peter Kelly and the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool.
Battle was born in County Sligo, Ireland in 1866. He was a professional merchant seaman and signed on at Liverpool on the Lusitania, on 12 April 1915 as an able seaman in the Deck Department at a monthly wage of £5.10s.0d, (£5.50). He took £1.10s.0d of this (£1.50), as an advance. His previous ship had been the Corsican.
He reported for duty aboard Lusitania at 7 am on 17 April 1915, the day she departed Liverpool for the last time. The crew muster ledger, now held at the Public Record Office, shows that he did not actually sign on for the voyage, but merely made the sign of a cross against his name, which presumably indicated that he could not write.
Battle survived the sinking with a badly injured left foot and leg, and the following is his account of the tragedy as reported in the Monday, 10 May 1915 Irish Independent newspaper:
“At the moment we were hit I was in my bunk below, smoking. The force of the first explosion threw me out on the floor, and I said to a chum: “That’s a torpedo”. We ran on deck, as the ship was heeling over heavily.
The port boats were flung in on our decks, and the starboard boats were swinging away some feet beyond the vessel’s side.
We got some of them away, and after an hour in the water myself and three or four other men got on to three upturned boats. We lashed them together and made a raft. There were boats enough on board to save twice as many people as we had if we had time to launch them, but the submarine didn’t give us a second’s warning and after sinking us slinked away and left us to drown. It was wholesale wilful murder.”
Second-class survivor, and fellow Irishman, John Sweeney, also mentioned the lashing of the three lifeboats together.
“We picked up 69 people. Nobody could know the horror of that time. I was on the end of the keel, helping to keep a woman and some others afloat. A man [trimmer Owen Slavin] was clinging to my legs with one hand. His other hand and arm from above the elbow was hanging off.
We pulled him on top of the boat. His arm was only hanging by a thin strip of muscle, and an Italian doctor who was on the craft cut off the arm and bandaged the stump with a piece of another passenger’s shirt.”
A number of survivors mentioned this incident. The Italian doctor was Silvio di Vescovi, a second-class passenger.
“We were on the raft, drifting about, 69 of us, each helping the other as well as we could to keep a grip. We were that way from 2.30 until 6.30, when the trawler, Caterina [sic] picked us up and brought us to Queenstown.”
The Caterina, also spelled in accounts as Katrina or Katerina, was actually the British steamer Westborough, disguised as a Greek steamer to evade the submarines. The lifeboat they were on was likely 22 A, the same collapsible upon which Lady Allan and Rita Jolivet were also saved.
Despite suffering injuries to his left leg and foot, and having been landed at Queenstown, Battle made his way back to Liverpool. In keeping with all the other crew survivors, he was paid off for the voyage, up until 8 May 1915, the balance owing to him being £3.8s.8d, (£3.43).
Links of interest
James Battle at the Merseyside Maritime Museum
Contributors
Peter Kelly, Ireland
Ellie Moffat, UK
Senan Molony, Ireland
References
1911 Census of England and Wales
Cunard Records
Irish Independent, 10 May 1915, page 5.
Molony, Senan. Lusitania: An Irish Tragedy. Mercier Press, 2004, page 76.
PRO BT 100/345.
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